'Beyond the Hills has no obvious villains': Cristian Mungiu

Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d'Or for his brilliantly agonising film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. He talks here about his new film Beyond the Hills, and why he thinks Romania should build more cinemas and fewer churches

Beyond the Hills: Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur as Voichita and Alina.

In the spring of 2005, a novice nun at a remote convent in north-eastern Romania heard (or thought she heard) the Devil's voice inside her head. The convent priest's solution was to perform an exorcism. He ordered 23-year-old Maricica Irina Cornici to be bound to a cross and gagged with a towel. Then he left her alone in a damp, dark room until the cure could take effect. She died three days later of suffocation and dehydration.

The Cornici case is the true-life phantom in the wings of Beyond the Hills, an exacting, disturbing new drama from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. A prizewinner at last year's Cannes film festival, the film lifts the lid on a 21st-century Europe still in thrall to superstitions and portents, the action centred on a spartan monastery with no power or running water. But be warned: if you're expecting a tub-thumping indictment of religious dogma and backwoods ignorance, Mungiu is not your man. His approach is measured, rigorous, even-handed. He shows the evil paths that good intentions take.

"There are no obvious villains here," the director insists. "Even the priest is not some corny bad guy. But somewhere along the way, it goes horribly wrong."

Mungiu made his name with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, an agonisingly tense account of a backstreet abortion that won the Cannes Palme d'Or in 2007. Like Beyond the Hills, 4 Months charted the pinched, shifting dynamic between a pair of young women – one more imperilled than the other. Aside from that, I can't think of any obvious parallels between the two pictures.

Mungiu frowns; he disagrees. "It's not the only similarity. The filmic style is still the same. I'm still working with long takes. I'm still not editing. I'm still not using music and I'm still not moving the camera." He smiles. "But yes, I am definitely drawn to issues of violence and repression. And probably women tend to be the victims of these things more often than men."

Beyond the Hills refashions Maricica Cornici as "Alina", an angry, angular orphan who washes up at a monastery in search of her old friend Voichita, who has remade herself as a nun. The film is fiction but the details are authentic. The creative choices, too, seem oddly telling. Mungiu has an older sister, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, who works as a political scientist.

"Yes," he says. "Alina is my sister's name. But you know, Alina means something different in Romania. If you put the stress on the last 'A' it means to care for somebody, to caress somebody. I mean, the film is not about my sister – except that maybe it is, a little bit. She has definitely cared for me in the past."

Mungiu, 44, worked as a teacher and a journalist before taking a film course in his native Bucharest. His films have established him as the leading light of the Romanian new wave; an acid chronicler of the communist regime that marked his own upbringing. 4 Months played out against a backdrop of oppression and hypocrisy, while his mordant Tales From the Golden Age documented a number of urban legends from the Ceausescu era. In one episode, a newspaper editor hastily doctors a photograph that makes the dictator look too short. In another, an impoverished family struggles to kill the illicit, black-market pig they are hiding in their home.

Beyond the Hills, by contrast, seems to exist outside history. On the one hand, it's a film that brings Mungiu bang up to date. On the other, it might just as well be set during the dark ages, in a realm of grinding poverty and ironclad irrationality, leagues away from the civilised world. And yet this, the director ruefully explains, is just the reality of much of modern-day Romania. One could even claim that it's a by-product of freedom.

"Freedom has given the state the power to build churches everywhere," he says. "We now have something like 20,000 churches in Romania for a population of 20 million. Thousands of churches and only 500 hospitals. I guess that shows the priorities of the state."

As for the man himself, he ranks near the bottom of that list of priorities. It is the curious fate of film-makers such as Mungiu to find themselves celebrated as heroes on the international festival circuit, while languishing in obscurity back in their homeland. He points out that there are now only about 10 or 12 single-screen cinemas across the whole of Romania – and that local films almost never find an audience.

"Last time I was able to do something about it," he recalls. "I organised a caravan and I toured the country showing 4 Months to people in places where they didn't have a cinema. I could do that because the Palme d'Or gave me visibility and the visibility allowed me to raise some funds. This time, who knows? I go back to Bucharest and I speak to the exhibitors and ask them to show my movie. But the exhibitors don't care what happens in Cannes. They are purely profit-oriented."

Mungiu sips at his water and gives a seraphic little smile. He is not blaming the exhibitors, who are just taking care of business. Nor is he blaming organised religion, which is doing much the same thing. The issue, he feels, extends further than that. "Maybe the state should have invested a little more in arts and healthcare over the past few years," he says. "Maybe more in building cinemas. Maybe less in building churches."